Duck threading, part 2
Day 1 had been a day of pizza. Despite some early sausage ingestion, the lure of tomato and cheese-topped bread produce was insurmountable. Turkish pizza in Kreuzberg had been followed by a suspiciously pizza-like cheese-and-salami-on-toast snack in the brown bar. The rider at the gig consisted of - you guessed it - pizza. Day 2 therefore became "the mission to avoid pizza".
Meeting in the lobby of the gloriously surreal Hotel Estrel, we solemnly pact-ed a pizza avoidance strategy (while looking at a worryingly pizza heavy snack menu). We'd checked into the hotel, a fabulously tacky and enormous cruise liner-esque monument, that seemed to have berthed in the middle of Neuköln, a notoriously dodgy area, because the promoter couldn't book us two nights in the very busy and much more central hotel we'd started out in. The Estrel was brilliant - less a hotel, more a German version of Las Vegas in miniature, complete with a galaxy of star impersonators in the evening floor show. Ooh, we were tempted to go and see the Blues Brothers' German cousins that evening. Ooh we were... No, we weren't. But it was nice to know it was there.
Having worked out the difference between the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, it was out for a spot of sightseeing. With childish foot stamping, I refused to go anywhere except the TV Tower. Luckily it was really busy. Hurrah. I took one look at the queue and suggested we go elsewhere. None of the others were particularly bothered. We then walked up the absolutely incredible Unter den Linden, a wide, mostly former East German boulevard lined with architecturally and historically significant buildings. Gawped. We did. One of us bought another sausage from a street vendor. But I'm contractually bound not to say who.
Some fleamarkets, amusing graffitti and a coffee or two later, we fetched up at Potsdamerplatz, which used to be a bombed out no-mans land around the Wall. Now modern buildings have sprung up around the otherwise sparsely built area. The feeling was eerie, like a mothership had come down and overnight deposited several hi-tech, angular landing craft in the middle of a recently-sterilised warzone. A forlorn, graffitti covered fragment of Wall survives there. Graffitti is a big thing in Berlin. Like sausage. And pizza.
Just off the 'platz was a huge complex of cinemas and movie museums. Architecturally, it was like London's shitty Millennium Dome, but, y'know, central and actually useful. Drawn like tired bipedal moths to a hi-tech flame, we drifted in, trying to find a place to sit and rest our barking dogs. I'm afraid to say that more sausages were consumed at this juncture. But no pizza.
On the way back to the Estrel, changing trains at a bleak Neukoln S-Bahn station, I'm sure someone shot at us. But the Berliners were clearly made of some unflappable material and ignored the alarming, skin-jumping noise.
Back at the hotel, we ate dinner (herrings! ha! weren't expecting that, were you?) in the cavernous piano-bar restaurant, surrounded by middle-aged revellers in too much make-up and perfume. They'd come to see the show. We were on the way out to a party. Some of us anyway. We conjectured that the black-clad pianoman singing 80s EasyHits was actually playing a CD and wanking behind the cover of the piano. He looked happy enough anyway, despite the lack of applause.
11.30pm and we were in a cab back to the centre. Club Rio on Chausseestrasse and more bands awaited us. The night before, I'd had an amazingly drunkenaddled backstage conversation with a kind lady from VICE magazine, who'd put us on the list. It was one of those guest lists whose resultant queue was longer than the paying one, but eventually we got in after some haggling with the dapper, tweedy and very weary man on the door. I was feeling totally dead by this point. The free champers and beer perked us all up for a couple of hours or three. The schoolyard punch-up between Derek, the lead singer of the Towers of London and the DJ was even fun. But not fun enough for us to endure the band's whole set. If I'd wanted to see a sham "Sham 69", I'd need my head examining.
On the way back to the hotel, the flight home scant hours away, the cab driver played classical music, which was absolutely what was required as we drove through the stilling streets of a city in flux. Berlin has still not stabilised from the reunion of its two halves. It seems a city in a constant state of creative change. It's exciting, tumultuous, exhausting and beautiful. It's a place that, unlike here in London, the property developers haven't completely neutered. But it's happening; wearily, the cab driver told us how one of his favourite areas, Kreuzberg, is slowly being hammered into a pale, submissive hollow of its exciting, vibrant old self. It's a trend he sees happening all over the city.
It's possible that 15 years after the wall fell, Berlin's undergoing an even more permanent change. I'll be going back, hopefully this year. Last chance to see...
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Duck threading
Berlin was an absolutely interesting place. There was nothing about it that was not somehow stimulating, challenging, exciting, scary, tasty, exhausting or gorgeous. Though what I realised as we flew away from it is the same thing I realise whenever we play in foreign cities, or even in British cities outside of London - that touring and gigging is no way to see or appreciate a place. There are flickers of impressions in there somewhere, but mostly, the booze, noise and late nights have obliterated the concrete memories.
It started badly because K, who was originally coming, had caught a very bad bout of flu and eventually decided very sensibly that getting up at 3am to fly to a very cold city then having to stay up probably very late the same night in a smoky, boozy environment was not a good idea. Still, it was a tearful moment when the final decision was made.
Having made it to Luton with heavy flight cases to check in for five am, the rest of the journey was a blur. Berlin Schonefeld airport was a bit of a benighted former East German hellhole, served by one of the bleakest railway stations I've ever encountered. The land around us was totally flat and we could see miles upon miles of blasted terrain; the former East Germany is still in recovery from the comedown that was the last century, it seems. It was here that the first of many sausages were eaten. Let it not go unsaid that Germany has fully mastered the art of sausage construction. Well done. Sehr gut!
To our immense relief, the journey to our hotel near the main station of Ostbahnhof very quick and pain free. I was delighted upon checking in that my window afforded an unencumbered view of the magnificent Communist Television Tower. I fully intended to scale its mighty "golfball-impaled-by-cocktail-stick" structure later on. Our happiness was also increased by the fact that the venue was across the road from the hotel, making this possibly the best and biggest dressing room we'd ever had. Ja!
The afternoon was spent wandering erratically around the East Centre and Centre of the city. Without much planning, and often without much of a clue that we were doing so, we managed to take in Kreuzberg, The Jewish Museum, Friedrichstrasse and Checkpoint Charlie, several second hand shops, a Turkish cafe, a brown bar (good beer and cheese on toast with salami and pinapple!) and get caught in a freezing rainstorm, before fleeing by cab back to the hotel to grab a couple of hours kip before soundcheck. Been up 15 hours at this point.
The gig itself was uneventful but the evening was very very long. Club Maria was an excellent and atmospheric venue, but the promoter had had a very hard time getting people into it because it was a fashion trade show weekend and most of Berlin was out partying at industry events with free booze and entry. Bah! Still, by the time we went on (over an hour late), the venue was not embarrassingly empty. We went down quite well, I think, though felt a bit tired in the second half of the set. Some of the others went back soon afterwards, but I stayed and boozed and saw all the other bands. I enjoyed almost all of them, but the best by far was the Berlin-based Rich and Kool, who transcended their Junior-Senior comparisons and charmed me and our tech guy with some electroclashy German rock and some good, unironic wit and humour. The others hated them. Ah well. I got back to the room about six.
Two hours later, we were up and checking out to go to the next hotel, the Estrel, which I can only describe as a cruise liner run aground. I'm grateful for the promoter who put us in there for our second day, as it was an uniquely surreal experience.
to be continued
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Berlin
Off to Berlin to play a gig tomorrow night, and won't be back till Monday. Pip pip. German people, if you want to come along, here are the details:
CLUB MARIA AM UFER
Maria am Ufer, An der Schillingbrücke, 10243 Berlin, GERMANY
Stage time: 10:30pm. Goes on all night.
Also playing: WHITEY, SELFISH CUNT, THE GIRLS, THOM REVOLVER
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The Unknown
Well, I was having a massive sift through my archive of digital junk when I found this screen grab. It's of an actual error I got a few years back using Word for Mac, which was even flakier pre Mac OS X, if you can believe such a thing. I still find the message brilliantly amusing, and somehow profound.
This was back when I was still a worker drone for a faceless and menacing beast known as a marketing agency. My job consisted mostly of trying to make nice websites that worked and looked great. I say trying because design by committee rarely works, and most of the time we ended up producing severely compromised work that looked and worked just about OK. The pity being that most of the time, our clients knew exactly what they wanted and we knew exactly what would work for them, us designers and developers. But the client "service" people would step in with their "I learned how to use the Internet by buying an overpriced holiday once on lastminute.com" attitude and invariably queer the pitch. Ah well.
So I'm a designer. I make websites. Still do, and I went freelance in order to give myself the freedom to choose the projects I want to work on, and still have time to do the things that don't necessarily make money, like music, writing, drawing and arsing about.
And it's been great, thanks. I do have more time, and my quality of job satisfaction is vastly improved, as is my work life balance. To invoke some more bafflegab. I downshifted. The band is doing very well too.
But here's the thing.
Somewhere along the line, I've realised that I've not really and truly done too much of the stuff that "doesn't necessarily make money". And I'm asking myself why that is, in the spirit of New Yearliness and Resolution and all that guff.
It's not for want of trying either...
In the past few years, I've started three novels, two screenplays, a short film, a solo music album, two graphic novels and I'm sure somewhere in my filing system I've made a start on some new form of life as well. What's even more bizarre, I consider these projects to be ongoing, even though realistically I know the chances of me finishing all of them are minuscule.
See, in my day to day work, I have project managers and timeboxes. In my band, I have the other four band members to motivate and inspire me. In my personal work, I have only myself. And I'm not a finisher. It bugs the fuck out of me.
I think basically, I like starting things because starting things is exciting and new, and bright and shiny and brilliant and lovely. And I cannot bear to finish things because the act of finishing means the end of beginning. How fucked up is that?
Well, ladies and laddies, THIS ENDS NOW. I'm going to start serialising one of my novels and my shorter graphic novel on this very weblog. If I so much as flinch from continuing to publish them, you, dear readers, must promise to punish me very badly. Together, we will finish some of my personal work. If it kills me.
2005, edit the unknown!
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I'm a Musician, writer, photographer, designer, transgendered z-list celebrity. Insomniac's boyfriend. Tragic glamour and sleepless nights are my fellow travellers. Skinny jeans and pointy shoes are my mode-us operandi. I like cats. Especially the ones who talk. Oh, and David Lynch.
